King Henry II of ENGLAND, KING

                          In his earlier life commonly known as Henry Fitz-Empress from thefact that his mother Matilda, daughter of Henry I, was first married tothe Emperor Heinrich V. Henry himself, however, was the son of her secondhusband, Geoffrey Plantagenet, and inherited from him the three importantfiefs of Anjou, Touraine, and Maine. Soon after his birth the EnglishWitan were made to swear fealty to the infant prince as heir to thethrone of England, but when Henry I died, in 1135, both Norman andEnglish barons, who greatly disliked Geoffrey Plantagenet, lent theirsupport to the rival claimant, Stephen of Blois. Despite the confusionand civil war which marked the ensuing years, young Henry seems to havebeen well educated, partly in England, partly abroad. When he was sixteenhe was knighted at Carlisle by King David of Scotland, when he waseighteen he succeeded to Normandy and Anjou, when nineteen he marriedEleanor of Aquitaine, the divorced wife of Louis VII of France, andsecured her inheritance, and when he was twenty he came to England andforced King Stephen to submit to terms. It is plain that when, a yearlater, upon Stephen's death, he succeeded to the English crown, men feltthat they had no novice to deal with either in diplomacy or in war.Whether through the accident of heredity or through conscious imitation,Henry II at once took up with signal success that work of constitutionaland legal reform which marked the administration of his grandfather,Henry I. The Angevin Henry was not a hero or a patriot as we understandthe terms nowadays, but he was, as Stubbs has said, "a far-seeing Kingwho recognized that the well-being of the nation was the surestfoundation of his own power". At home, then, he set to work from thebeginning to face a series of problems which had never yet been settled,the question of Scotland, the question of Wales, the frauds of fiscalofficers, the defects of royal justice, and the encroachments of thefeudal courts. In all these undertakings he was loyally seconded by hisnew chancellor, one who had been cordially recommended to him byArchbishop Theobald and one who was sufficiently near his own age toshare his vigour and his enthusiasm. There is but one voice amongstcontemporaries to render homage to the strong and beneficial governmentcarried on by Henry and his chancellor Thomas Becket during seven oreight years. All dangerous resistance was crushed, the numberless feudalcastles were surrendered, and the turbulent barons were not unwilling toacquiesce in the security and order imparted by the reorganized machineryof the exchequer and by a more comprehensive system of judicialadministration. The details cannot be given here. The reforms werelargely embodied in the "Assizes" issued later in the reign, but in mostcases the work of reorganization had been set on foot from the beginning.As regards foreign policy Henry found himself possessed of dominions suchas no English king before him had ever known. Normandy, Maine, Anjou, andAquitaine were united to the English crown in 1154, and before twentyyears had passed Nantes, Quercy, Brittany, and Toulouse had allpractically fallen under English rule. It has recently been maintained(by Hardegan, "Imperialpolitik Heinrichs II.", 1905) that Henrydeliberately adopted a policy of competing with the emperor and that hemade the empire itself, as Giraldus Cambrensis seems to state (Opera,VIII, 157), the object of his ambition, being invited thereto both by thewhole of Italy and by the city of Rome. If this be an exaggerated view,it is nevertheless certain that Henry occupied a foremost position inEurope, and that England for the first time exerted an influence whichwas felt all over the Continent.  The prosperity which smiled on Henry'searly years seems in a strange way to have been broken by his quarrelwith his former favourite and chancellor. He whom we now honour as St.Thomas of Canterbury was raised to the archbishopric at his royalmaster's desire in 1162. It is probable that Henry was influenced in hischoice of a primate by the anticipation of conflicts with the Chur
       ch. Nodoubt he was already planning his attack on the jurisdiction of theCourts-Christian, and it is also probable enough that Thomas himself haddivined it. This, if true, would explain the plainly expressedforebodings which the future archbishop uttered on hearing of hisnomination. In his attack on the jurisdiction of the spiritual courtsHenry may have desired sincerely to remedy an abuse, but the extent ofthat abuse has been very much exaggerated by the anti-papal sympathies ofAnglican historians, more especially of so influential a writer as BishopStubbs. Henry's masterful and passionate nature was undoubtedlyembittered by what he deemed the ingratitude of his former favourite --even St. Thomas's resignation of the chancellorship, on being madeArchbishop, had deeply mortified him -- but when, as the climax of sixyears of persecution which followed the saint's rejection of theConstitutions of Clarendon, the Archbishop was brutally murdered on 29December, 1170, there is no reason to doubt that Henry's remorse wassincere. His submission to the humiliating penance, which he performedbarefoot at the martyr's shrine in 1174, was an example to all Europe.When the news came that on that very day the Scottish king, who wassupporting a dangerous insurrection in the North, had been taken prisonerat Alnwick, men not unnaturally regarded it as a mark of the Divinefavour. It is not impossible, and has been recently suggested by L.Delisle, that the restoration of the style "Dei gratia Rex Anglorum" (bythe grace of God King of the English), which is observable in the royalcharters after 1172, may be due to intensified religious feeling. In anycase there is no sufficient reason for saying with Stubbs that St. Thomaswas responsible for a grievous change in Henry's character towards theclose of his life. The misconduct and rebellion of his sons, probably atthe instigation of his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, are amply sufficientto account for some measure of bitterness and vindictiveness. On theother hand, after Henry by his penance had owned himself beaten upon thequestion of the Church Courts, his legal and constitutional reforms (suchas those which developed the germs of trial by jury, the circuits of thetravelling justices, etc.) were pushed on more actively than ever. Thisfact forms a strong argument for the view that St. Thomas was resistingnothing which was essential to the well-being of the kingdom. Moreover,it is in these last years of Henry's life that we find the mostattractive presentment of his character in his relations with theCarthusian, St. Hugh of Lincoln, a saint whom the king himself hadpromoted to his bishopric. St. Hugh evidently had a tender feeling forHenry, and he was not a man to connive at wickedness. Again, the list ofHenry's religious foundations is a considerable one, even apart from thethree houses established in the commutation of his vow. Moreover, at thevery end of his life he seems to have been sincere in his interest in thecrusade, while his organization of the "Saladin Tithe", like that of the"Scutage" at the beginning of the reign, marked an epoch in the historyof English taxation. The conquest of Ireland which Henry had projected in1156 and for which he obtained a Bull from Pope Adrian IV (q.v.) wascarried out later with the full sanction of Pope Alexander III, preservedto us in letters of unquestionable authenticity which concede insubstance all that was granted by the disputed Bull of Adrian. The deathof Henry was sad and tragic, embittered as it was by the rebellion of hissons Richard and John, but he received the last sacraments before the endcame. "I think", says William of Newburgh, "that God wished to punish himseverely in this life in order to show mercy to him in the next."